Called Unto Ourselves?

Someone said that 'the value of any religion can be determined by how it serves it's non-adherents.' I'm concerned that the church in America is growing increasingly insular as mainstream culture becomes increasingly secular. Ironically, it's exactly this isolation from those outside of faith that is creating the cultural backlash and impression that the church is self-absorbed.

When my kids were younger, we would occasionally walk over to a church playground near our house. I noticed a few months ago that the church had put up an iron fence around their property with padlocks on the gates. I'm guessing this wasn't enough to keep the community out of their playground because they recently added a big fat red sign ...."No Trespassing. For the use by Holy Spirit Community only..." I was grieved for the church when I saw this new sign.

Ok. I know what you are thinking. 'With the litigious society, they are simply protecting themselves from potential liability.' I suppose that argument can be used to avoid almost any activity that involves people outside of the congregation (or for that matter, those inside). I know a few attorneys and I've asked them about this. No one seems to able to point to a precedent-setting case where a church was found liable for the playground accidents of its non-adherents.

This is all a symptom of an illness that is plaguing the church in America. Pastors are trying to keep their members happy because their livelihood depends on it. Their members are often more focused on protecting the institution than fueling the mission. It's a dilemma that leads to an isolated and self-protecting congregation.

All this makes me more committed to our cause - "joining God in bringing reconciliation to a broken and needy world." The heart of our mission is serving and loving the non-adherents. My belief and experience is that this external-focus will always make the adherents more content as well. So join me in welcoming all trespassers at the FOM.

Fly Turtles and Overloaded Life Rafts

“The flower said I wish I was a tree, the tree said I wish I could be a different kind of tree. The cat wished that it was a bee, the turtle wished that it could fly really high into the sky, over roof tops and then dive deep into the sea. And in the sea there is a fish, a fish that has a secret wish, a wish to be a big cactus with a pink flower on it.”

So tonight I was laying in bed listening to music (with my head phones on so as not to disturb my sleeping wife) and I was struck by the lyrics of this song. They seemed to blend together with some things that have been hanging around my heart, but never really become clear enough to put to words. So I am going to take a rambling and likely ill-fated stab at it…

A lot of what has been hanging around my heart has to do with life rafts. I’ve been reading a book by Donald Miller and he talks about our need to draw our understanding of who we are from outside ourselves. That we are created in such a way that our identity is intended to be drawn from God, but most of us, being in various states of self- imposed distance from God, have turned to drawing our identity from the people around us. The result is we live our life like we are on an overcrowded life raft, always comparing ourselves to the people around us, never wanting to be at the bottom of the totem pole, because that person gets thrown overboard. We are constantly basing our self-worth on acceptance from and comparison to other people.

Great, so what does that have to do with flowers, and trees, and fish that want to be cacti? Good question. I’m not sure I have a good answer. But it may have something to do with the fact that I am realizing more and more that this desire to be cool, to be accepted, to be in a firm position in the life raft pecking order, keeps me in an odd state of dissatisfaction with who I am, where I am, and what I am doing with my life. It feels like every day I look around me and see people who are so creative and talented and brilliant and I think, “What am I doing here?! I am not even in the same stratosphere as these people. How long before they figure that out?” And then I talk to friends about all the amazing places God is taking them and experiences he is putting them through and I long for those to be my experiences. I think to myself, “What am I doing wrong that all of these things are someone else’s life, not mine.” In it all I feel myself being pulled toward the edge of the life raft because I don’t think I am a dynamic and exciting personality, and I am not on the front lines of global justice issues, and a hundred other reasons why I don’t measure up to the people I know and the other people they know. My move to the edge of the life raft sets off this dialogue in my head that takes me places like…if you could just learn to interject more esoteric wit into your conversations, or find the right counter culture authors (or song lyrics) to quote, or learn to play the accordion, then you would be who you want to be.

Here’s the thing, I know God wants me to be changing. And I think that some of my dissatisfaction with who and where I am is because I am not all of who God created me to be. How could I be if I am looking around the life raft for my identity? I am a flower that wants to be a tree, not knowing that there is a fish somewhere that wants to be a flower. So instead of letting God reform me into who he wants me to be, I put all of my effort into trying to become who he wants someone else to be. All that effort to be someone else seems ridiculous to me. I just wish that it didn’t feel like anything else would send me swimming.

2008-The Year of New Beginnings?

What does that mean, actually: "the year of new beginnings"?
My charismatic friend tells me that the number 8 symbolizes renewal, but my channels must be tuned all wrong--I still don't get it. I check my Bible and I see references to days to circumcision, and numbers of sons born, how many oxen needed for 4 carts... what am I missing? Is there some gnostic pill I should take at communion that will give me this 'Epiginosko'? Sometimes I feel like such a clod!
Or like when the Prayer of Jabez thing came out, and book stores and trinket sellers made a small fortune, and everybody was looking to enlarge their boundaries, and I'm trying to figure out why I was never taught about Jabez in seminary, or why I can't really remember reading about him each year in my OYB. I find this very confusing, and disheartening, like being assigned to the "slow readers" circle in primary school, except now it's spiritual.
Perhaps I am so jaded that I am blinded by my cynicism; perhaps my shortcomings have caught up to me and locked me into the honorable mention section of the balcony, you know, that little ribbon you get at the end of the competition, because "nobody's a loser", but you know for fact that you didn't get first, second or third most favored?
What makes it even worse is when I read the gospels, and Jesus is saying things like, "Don't be impressed with buildings--those stones are gonna topple," or things like, "I don't own squat on this planet-- come follow me," what do you do with THAT? Sheessh-- talk about confusing.
Maybe the best I can do is get up again tomorrow, bake my little roll of biscuits, sip my coffee and read another day of the OYB as the sun rises... hey, I'm three for three this year as of this morning! I've even had time to pray for friends before riding to work.
Not bad; it's no Prayer-of-Jabez, but maybe it's my 2008.

*OYB--One Year Bible

BC-Before Christ?

This time of year whispers premonitions, forthcoming shadows of seasons to come. It starts in parking lots. That sort of makes sense, considering that erecting seven-foot Mylar globes (festooned with appropriate props to elucidate the thought, “ornament”) is a space-intensive process in a venue that will soon be crammed with frantic frenzy-feeders, omnivores not likely appreciative of the pragmatics of preparation when it impacts THEIR steed’s stall.

Parking lots during the holidays remind me of the “canyonlands” of Western lore, those secretive coves from which the guys in the black hats take shots at you, or perhaps offer a hidden valley around the next corner… a place you go not knowing what to expect, yet wearing a robe of visceral apprehension that hopes to cry out, “Don’t hit my car,” or “Hey- I’m on my way to that parking space for which I’ve been waiting for five minutes.”

Or maybe parking lots are the metaphor of lost-ness our culture proudly displays, thinking we’ve arrived while not even beginning, a starting point for a quest to seek, nay verily, to capture that sacred object and transport said trinket back to our storehouses (perhaps stopping first at gift wrap, of course).

Or maybe it represents the chaos of chasing wind, a myopic madness that perpetuates itself into the GNP only to be later assessed as taxes for the new land-fill. Chaos that knows that something should happen, and happen quickly, and if it doesn’t happen, well you’re just…. just… not good, or something! Chaos that feels the tug of things still undone, couples it with a due date, and frames it with Precious Memories.

Chaos and lost-ness are not new to me. I remember a time of my own, a time of fear and shame, a time when I did not know if I were truly loved or just “handy” for parental-peer accolades; a time of depressive darkness that hung so thickly that I could not differentiate my despair from my childhood asthma. I remember the pumped up pressure to perform or better yet, pretend. I remember what it was to be lost amongst a crowd, not in a mall, but in a church congregation. I remember the hungering question, not unlike a boy getting socks instead of a pocketknife, “Is this it?”

Enter: the donkey. Not a stallion, not a burley mule; just the donkey of a Palestinian tradesman in the occupied territories of Israel, a scene right out of the pages of Life magazine or some other photo-journalistic record. I remember the story since childhood, how this girl got pregnant with God, and decanted Hope from the dregs of daily life. The scene was not cute; it was cruel. There were no bathrobes, just impoverished people lost in the chaos of trying to find a space… and most of them missed it. Too busy trying to find their own place to park.

I praise God for the memories of what it was like before Christ: the loneliness, the despair, the empty searching. It reminds me I don’t ever want to go back to Egypt, and it garners for me the hope for others who do not yet understand what is so Good about the news that a child was born in Bethlehem. Come Lord Jesus.

-- Jim Kelley

Everything else is a bunch of crap

I'm not sure I've experienced this fully. The idea that everything else is crap. Paul says in Phillipians 3 that "I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, for whose sake I have lost all things and consider them rubbish (Gr. dung, trash, excrement, crap) in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him..."

So this means that all accolades and accomplishments... my reputation, that is crap? This means that all pleasures that I experience...those are crap? This means that coffee, like really good coffee, that is crap? This means that my health. That is crap? Does this mean that my relationships, even the most fulfilling ones with people who I love, those are crap? All the comforts that I enjoy, a soft mattress, a really good steak and AC in the summer. All that is crap. Really?

Well…yes. I guess compared to "knowing Christ and being found in him" all that other stuff, by comparison, is a bunch of crap. It's a bunch of dung. Does this mean that compared to the satisfaction that these other things bring, knowing Christ will be more satisfying? Does this mean that these other things are, by comparison, not even moderately fulfilling? Well, then I guess I should pursue it. Maybe I should check it out.

What would it take for me to know Christ more deeply? What would it take for me to really surrender to him? Maybe I should find out, because everything thing else is a bunch of crap!

I Choose Xbox

“The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy.”

I am found out. All over my life I see my desire to be different being trumped by my complete and total inability to follow through. Nowhere is this more true than in my life with God. A quick reading of my journal reveals that I seem to come to God with the same personal frustrations over and over, the same failings and short comings, the same acute separation between who I know God wants me to be and who I actually allow myself to be. It seems that week after week, year after year, I know the areas in my life that need to be conformed and need to be molded, but I have so little patience for the change process that I refuse to engage in it.

Really though, shouldn’t everything happen now. I seem to think so. If I cannot be gratified immediately, or at the very least within a time frame of my own crafting, and usually by my own conditions, then I don’t want any part an undertaking. This is why I seem unable to lose those few stubborn pounds I want off. The work required doesn't to fit into my schedule, dieting doesn’t produce instant results, and frankly, any diet that doesn’t include a steady amount of french fries just isn’t worth it to me. Sadly, I am finding that the same is true for my spiritual life. I want God to transform me, but I am not really willing to engage in any kind of “lifestyle cramping” effort that would actually result in me becoming more of the person He created me to be and I deeply desire to be. And I am definitely not willing to give up french fries for God.

Don’t get me wrong, God does change me. He works on me, shapes me, and molds me, it is just usually against my will. I can’t help but think there is an easier way, a way where I willingly take part in developing my heart and mind. What would my life look like, and who would I be, if I didn’t expect God to work in my life like he is wielding a magic wand. Instant transformation for instant gratification, that’s my expectation. But for some reason, God has decided to actually give me a part in the change process, to let me participate in the remaking of myself. In my case it was a dangerous decision, because for some reason, given the choice to invest in becoming the person that I deep down in my heart want to be, or to play Xbox, I tend to choose Xbox.

If you love one another...

According to my good friend, Wikipedia (remember, if it's on the internet, it's gotta be true!), there was a man named Tertullian who was an early church leader. The son of a Roman soldier, he lived from 155-230 A.D. in Africa. After his conversion to Christianity sometime around 197 A.D., he wrote quite a bit to Roman leaders defending this new persecuted faith, including the following:

“We are an association bound together by our religious profession, by the unity of our way of life and the bond of our common hope…We meet together as an assembly and a society…We pray for the emperors…We gather together to read our sacred writing…With the holy words we nourish our faith…After the gathering is over the Christians go out as they had come from a school of virture. It is our care of the helpless that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’”

Others in that early church era who lived outside of the Christian faith noted how different the Christians were. How they were willing to stay and care for the sick as plagues decimated villages, while the doctors of the day fled for the hills. Leaders and authorities marvelled at how they cared for the poor far better than the government of the day did.

Jesus told his followers it would be this way. He told them that they would be recognized as different because of their love for one another.

Do we look that way today? Would the world recognize us as Christ-followers by how we care for each other and those outside the church? Are they curious to know what it was that gave us peace enough to make us a bit strange or alien?

I've seen this in practice specifically in relation to our little league sports ministries. I've seen the looks on faces of parents in these leagues who are astonished to learn that the team they are playing that week is one sponsored entirely by a local church...sponsored not merely with money but with time and effort and love. While I am not nearly as active in that ministry as I would like to be, I really enjoy that others get a chance to see that kind of service born out of love. Sharing what we're doing there with others is part of that ministry, I believe...and is another example of God multiplying the work we do.